Anyone who rides MUNI regularly has seen fare inspectors checking Clipper cards, and writing citations. What influences the number of citations written on any given day - does weather have any impact? The answer is yes, but the details are more complicated.

Online job boards are an increasingly common way for people to find jobs. How do platforms like ZipRecruiter and Indeed handle potentially discriminatory job postings? This post looks specifically at EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) violations against people with criminal records, where companies include blanket exclusionary statements like "No Criminal Background" in their job descriptions - and describes a dataset of potential violations on ZipRecruiter.

How does the state of California measure prison overcrowding? It looks at the total number of people in its prisons and compares it to the combined capacity of its 35 state prisons - the Supreme Court ordered California to decrease its prison population to 137.5% of the system's designed capacity. Yet 15 out of the state's 35 prisons have populations exceeding 137.5%. Is that the correct way to measure overcrowding? This post explores why an aggregated measure like this can be misleading, and suggests a few simple alternatives.

Public Defender's Offices are extremely understaffed - this post looks specifically at California, and compares the size of the District Attorney's Office vs. the size of the Public Defender's Office in California counties. Despite handling ~80% of serious criminal cases, the median Public Defender's Office in California counties has just 43% the number of employees of the District Attorney's Office.

The Cook County State's Attorney's Office released an interesting dataset on how their prosecutors have handled thousands of cases since 2011. It turns out that narcotics cases are initiated differently from all other types of cases - this article explores how "direct filing" leads to a significant number of narcotics cases being dismissed. What would happen if those defendants weren't charged to begin with?